More than 300,000 listeners flock each summer to Tanglewood, established in 1937 on the site of the Tappan estate; the summer home of the Boston Symphony and the Tanglewood Music Center for advanced young musicians is two miles from the center of Lenox, but most of the campus actually is in Stockbridge.
Summertime concertgoers crowd the streets of downtown Lenox, eating at the town's prestigious but expensive eateries and shopping at an intriguing mix of retail establishments.
Other prime attractions include the highly regarded theater troupe Shakespeare & Co., The Mount (home of author Edith Wharton), the Massachusetts Audubon Society's 1,300-acre Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, and the town-owned, 500-acre Kennedy Park, with its extensive network of hiking and cross-country skiing trails. Ventfort Hall, an Elizabethan Revival mansion built in 1893, now houses the Museum of the Gilded Age as it continues a major renovation project.
The Church on the Hill and its cemetery loom over the historic village district at its highest point. The Berkshire Scenic
Accommodations range widely from the older, basic motels along the Route 7 and 20 "strip" to quaint B&Bs, inns and luxurious resorts such as Cranwell and Blantyre. Canyon Ranch, the former Bellefontaine mansion, is one of the nation's most expensive and highly touted upscale spas. (The Kripalu new-age spa, although it has a Lenox mailing address, is in Stockbridge; the same is true of the Wheatleigh resort).
But from the end of fall foliage season until late spring, Lenox changes character dramatically, belonging primarily to its full-time residents, many of whom work in Pittsfield; several of the tonier eateries along Restaurant Row in the heart of the historic village are shuttered for some or all of the winter, and it's a long and mostly quiet season for the merchants who remain open.
While the town retains upper-income residential areas, most of the residents are middle-income, clustered just outside the historic village district, along East Street, and in Lenox Dale, two miles down a long hill from Town Hall and seemingly more attuned to the town of Lee. Lenox Dale has its own post office and a a few stores, as well as factories and small businesses. The neighborhood of North Lenox, bordering Pittsfield, is a business center; it has its own fire station and is also primarily middle-income.
Ironically, the high school boys' basketball team is called the Lenox Millionaires — a tongue-in-cheek reference to the town's history as a seasonal retreat for the wealthy. Many members of Lenox's multi-generational families worked for the famous millionaires of the past, including the Astors, Andrew Carnegie, the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, George Westinghouse and Anson Phelps Stokes. Echoes of class divisions from the distant past still surface occasionally, especially in times of controversy.
The region, at first a wilderness populated by Mahican Indians, suffered from the French and Indian Wars, which finally wound down in the 1760s. An early traveler from Albany to Boston described the area as "a hideous, howling wilderness," according to the extensive town history posted on the official Lenox Web site.
The town, on a high plateau with October Mountain State Forest and the Housatonic River to the east and Yokun Ridge to the west, was first settled around 1750 by Jonathan and Sarah Hinsdale of Hartford, Conn., who set up a general store (selling rum in quantity)
Because of the intervening mountains, Lenox was split off from Richmond in 1767 and renamed for the British nobleman Charles Lennox ("Laemhnachd" in Scottish Gaelic); he was the Duke of Richmond and a defender of the colonists' bid for independence. The story goes that the name was misspelled by a clerk at the time of incorporation. Landowner Israel Dewey held the first town meeting on March 1, 1767, at his home that is now the site of the Birchwood Inn.
Lenox contributed 231 soldiers to the Revolutionary army after war with England broke out. Col. John Paterson, a local lawyer, was among them; although he later lived in New York state and was a member of Congress, his descendants, the Eglestons, had his remains returned to Lenox. The stone monument in the center of the historic village was erected in his honor in 1892.
Early generations were occupied by farming, sawmills, textile mills, glassworks and quarrying. A vein of iron ore was followed by mine-digging, creation of a vast network of tunnels under what is now the historic business district, and the opening of an iron works in Lenox Dale (first known as Lenox Furnace) during the 1780s.
As the geographic center of Berkshire County, Lenox was the county seat ("shiretown") from 1784 until 1868, when Pittsfield took over. Since then, the Lenox Library has occupied the historic county courthouse built in 1816. The town became more widely known because of the many people on both sides of the legal fence who had business to transact in Lenox.
It wasn't long before visitors began arriving in large numbers via a northward extension of the Housatonic Railroad ("the Stockbridge-Pittsfield Railroad"), completed in 1838, with three stops in Lenox Dale, the Lenox station at the foot of Housatonic Street, and North Lenox. The railroad also fueled the shipment of industrial products.
The town already had achieved status as an arts colony. Author Catherine Sedgwick, a Stockbridge native, and members of her family were early residents, beginning in the 1820s, soon followed by her friend, the actress, writer and socialite Fanny Kemble, who stayed at the Curtis Hotel.
Nathaniel Hawthorne spent 1850 and part of 1851 in a cottage just over the town line in Stockbridge along what was later named Hawthorne Road. He wrote "The House of the Seven Gables," began work on "Tanglewood Tales," and socialized with Herman Melville, who was writing "Moby-Dick" at his nearby Arrowhead home in Pittsfield. Hawthorne grew tired of the harsh winters after two seasons and moved out; his cottage burned in 1890 and a replica was built in 1948, part of the Tanglewood campus.
Edith Wharton's estate, "The Mount," was built in 1902; she lived and wrote there for nine years, but her novels, "Ethan Frome" and "Summer" did not reflect well on the area and its residents.
The Berkshire Cottage era developed gradually, beginning in the mid-19th century with the construction of the Highwood estate, purchased from private owners and added to the Tanglewood grounds in the mid-1980s. Numerous other estates followed, and the town, dubbed the "inland Newport," was considered on a par with Newport, R.I. , and Bar Harbor, Maine, as a summer season retreat for the high and mighty. At that time, the annual Tub Parade began as the final event of the autumn season, a chance for the well-heeled to strut their fancy carriages and fine horses. The event is still held each year as a tourist attraction.
A real-estate boom gripped the town as the 20th century dawned; a typical acre in Lenox was priced at $20,000 — an exorbitant sum when a typical acre in nearby towns sold for less than $100. The boom gradually went bust during a 20-year period that saw the first federal income tax, World War I and the Great Depression. While some estates were abandoned and either crumbled or fell into disrepair (such as Ventfort Hall), others became religious retreats or private schools. The Bible Speaks fundamentalist religious order (a cult, by some accounts) fled from its sprawling property in the mid-1980s. The badly deteriorated site was acquired by Shakespeare and Company after a proposed, highly touted National Music Center fizzled.
The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, just over the town line, is on the site of industrialist Andrew Carnegie's Shadowbrook estate, originally built in 1893 for Anson Phelps Stokes; later, it became a Jesuit noviate (rebuilt after a fire leveled the original estate) and was briefly considered in the 1960s as the site of a state prison.
After many of the private schools in Lenox closed, the properties gained new life as vacation resorts and condo developments. More than 70 years after the cottage era faded, the town remains the seasonal haunt of prosperous urban dwellers seeking rural respite, rejuvenation and culture.
A detailed chronicle, compiled by John Townes from a variety of historical sources, can be accessed via the well-developed official Web site, www.townoflenox.com.
With the annual town meeting and elections looming in early May, residents face three warrant articles on the future of the financially challenged Lenox Library.
Select Board Chairman Robert Akroyd and Town Manager Gregory Federspiel agree that this is the key issue facing the town, and both are hopeful and optimistic that voters will pass by the necessary two-thirds majority the plan agreed to by town officials and the Lenox Library Association.
Under the plan, the town would purchase the library's real estate, including the adjoining Roche Reading Park, and would continue to appropriate town funding annually toward library operations. The state attorney general's office has signed off on the plan, which would retain the association to operate the library and to raise an estimated $200,000 a year in private donations, on top of town support, currently nearly $250,000 a year.
"It's a dominating issue, a lot of work has been done on it, there has been a lot of debate, listening and fine-tuning of proposals," said Federspiel. "My sense is that there's very strong favor toward purchasing the building and the land and having it secured in town hands. There are still some questions about how to operate and run it, and still some debate, but I think a consensus will emerge. There's still some information that needs to get out there. I have a lot of faith in the plan we have."
"I think at the end of the evening, one way or the other, there'll be a resolution that will be satisfactory to all parties involved," said Akroyd. "I don't think the residents of the town are opposed to acquiring the real estate and the architecture; I think the town is concerned with the annual appropriation that goes to the library, and that's where a good amount of conversation will focus on at the town meeting."
If necessary, the annual town meeting on Thursday, May 3, will be continued to Tuesday, May 8, to accomodate what's expected to be extensive debate on the library plan, Federspiel said. The meetings will be held at 7 p.m. in the Duffin Auditorium at the Lenox Memorial Middle and High School.
Other priorities cited by the town manager include "the whole issue of how to best manage our growth; we've had a number of fairly controversial projects in the past year. The Planning Board and the Selectmen are aiming for a special town meeting in the fall to change our zoning laws. We need to take a hard look at what our regulations do and don't allow; these should be continually updated and revised. The Planning Board has had real success with a series of neighborhood meetings, and they want to translate this into specific proposals for the fall."
Federspiel noted that all zoning proposals and revisions require two-thirds approval by town voters.
A long-standing proposal by downtown marketing firm Winstanley Associates for a townhouse, office and retail complex in the historic village vicinity was rejected last Wednesday by the Zoning Board of Appeals, a decision based on current zoning bylaws.
Nathan Winstanley said he won't appeal the decision and, after weighing his options, he's "pretty sure" he'll leave town. Proponents of business development in the village had favored the project in order to inject vitality into the downtown area during the lengthy off-season; nearby residents and others opposed it, citing its size and its non-conformity with zoning requirements.
Previously voted down by the ZBA because it required a zoning variance was a proposal by Berkshire Orthopedic Associates to utilize part of the rear building of the Aspinwell complex (formerly the Lenox Shops) as a day-surgery clinic. Town meeting voters will see a petition at the annual town meeting for a bylaw amendment to allow such clinics to be built in the town by right.
A proposal by the Essencials Day Spa to relocate from the intersection of the Pittsfield Road and Holmes Road to the nearby Berkshire Information Systems facility (the former Edgewood Motel) also was turned down because there is nothing in the decade-old bylaws pertaining to day spas.
Akroyd calls the current zoning bylaw "a patchwork that should be taken apart, dismantled and put back together again in a much more user-friendly format to properly address all these issues we have." He praised the Planning Board for pursuing an "incredibly prudent course of action" by taking its time and evaluating input from neighborhood residents.
While Federspiel voices concern about needed infrastructure improvements — water supply, town sewer system extension and road upgrades — he emphasizes his "desire to make sure we're growing in accordance with the values and needs of the town." He's also closely examining ways of "greening" the town's operations and achieving budget efficiencies to hold down annual property-tax rate increases.
Akroyd, whose great-grandparents settled in Lenox and who returned in the early '90s after pursuing the early phase of his career in landscape architecture and land use in Boston and Hartford, is passionate about his hometown. He sees few drawbacks, other than the affordability "struggle" he and many others face, and the long winters.
"I love the history of Lenox, the buzz of activity with Tanglewood, Jacob's Pillow, and all the cultural attractions, the way the village feels when you drive through it with Lilac Park in the center," Akroyd declares. "Equally important, I really love the people here, the close-knit feel that the community has. We don't always agree on things ... people aren't afraid to voice their opinions, but then they'll grab a cup of coffee with you and walk around. It's a really comfortable place to live. I love the way the town looks, the people, the camaraderie, the friendliness everyone has, feeling a part of the community, that we're all in this together."
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